France’s Uber-taxi war is on

PARIS — French taxi drivers have been warning for months to anyone willing to listen that their frustration over wildcat competition from Uber and similar ride-sharing services had reached a tipping point, and they weren’t going to stand for it any longer.

It turns out they weren’t kidding.

On Thursday, taxi drivers’ brewing hatred for Uber — and particularly the UberPop service that allows amateur drivers to pick up fares — spilled over into violence on the margins of a national strike against the American-based app, which was launched four years ago in France.

Rock star Courtney Love said on Twitter that protesters had attacked her car with stones and metal bats. She urged President François Hollande to send police to the airport and said she felt safer in Baghdad.

In northwest Paris, a group of taxi drivers swarmed an unmarked van, yanked out the driver, slashed his tires and smashed his windshields and rearview mirrors. The man had driven unwittingly into a protester roadblock — one of many causing Beijing-style traffic jams around France.

“Why did you come to work today? You knew there was a strike,” Le Figaro newspaper quoted one protester as saying to the van’s driver, who told the paper he was not employed by Uber.

Anyone trying to order an Uber car got the following message: “Strong demand on the Uber network — there is a taxi strike today, so demand will be strong and the service may be disrupted.”

The eruption of rage comes after months of legal wrangling over whether Uber can keep operating UberPop, the service that has concentrated most of the taxi drivers’ hatred.

Last year, a French law banned UberPop and severely curtailed the activities of non-taxi chauffeur services. But in December, the Paris commercial court refused to ban UberPop, and the case was bumped up to the highest court in the land for a final decision.

Throughout the conflict, Uber has remained defiant and fought back against criticism by saying it will continue to expand despite the protests. While Uber’s lawyers have appealed to the European Commission to overturn the French ban on the grounds that it clashes with EU legislation, the company has continued to launch its service in new French cities, fueling yet more outrage from taxi drivers.

Despite Thursday’s violence, France’s socialist government sides with the taxis.

Taxi unions complain that UberPop drivers are stealing fares and raking in profits while they drown under license-debt and struggle to pay for cars.

“We can’t let taxi drivers succumb to a ‘survival of the fittest’ system,” Claude Bartolone, president of the socialist group in parliament, told BFMTV, adding that he was in favor of banning UberPop.

France’s Uber-taxi conflict, which has corollaries across Europe and even in the United States, boils down to anger over what taxi drivers feel is unfair competition from Uber.

While licensed taxi drivers undergo rigorous testing, pay high social fees and shell out for licenses that sell for as much as €230,000 each in Paris, UberPop drivers face no such constraints.

Taxi unions complain that UberPop drivers, who pay taxes on their sales but no social fees, are stealing fares and raking in profits while they drown under license-debt and struggle to pay for cars, which are often loaned to them at eye-watering daily rates by firms like G7 or Les Taxis Bleus.

Meanwhile, French customers have cheered the arrival of Uber, which has broken the taxi firms’ longstanding monopoly over personal transport. Uber’s drivers tend to be friendlier than their licensed peers, and they offer perks like sweets or mineral water. When Uber’s controversial “surge-pricing” scheme is not in effect, its service tends to be cheaper.

Most importantly, Uber fills a vacuum of supply during late-night hours on holidays and weekends — times when, just five years ago, it could be impossible to find a taxi in many French cities.

Even as French taxis rage against Uber, the competition has forced them to change. Several taxi companies now offer smartphone apps that allow customers to track their car’s progress, just like with Uber. Some have gone so far as to start stocking their cars’ magazine pockets with bottles of mineral water.

Authorities have also tried to change the equation. To make up for the lack of supply, the prefect in Paris and several other cities have issued thousands of new taxi licenses and upped recruitment of drivers over the past few years — with the paradoxical result that too many taxis are now free in the daytime, and still too few at night.

In the end, short of an outright ban on UberPop that would be difficult, if not impossible to enforce, the conflict can only be resolved by some balancing out of costs between overburdened taxis and under-burdened Ubers.

One radical solution would be for the French government to buy up licenses at their current market value, freeing taxi drivers from debts that are the real source of rage against Uber. But the cost of such an operation — €4 billion just for Paris, which has about 20,000 taxis, according to an estimate by researcher Guillaume Allègre — makes it prohibitive for a cash-strapped government already struggling to bring its public deficit down to European Union-imposed targets.

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